Corey and I met
over a D&D game at a Science Fiction Convention, and
games have always been a critical part of our lives. We really wanted to
create computer games. Our chance came when a friend, Carolly Hauksdottir,
who worked as an artist for Sierra On-line, told us that Sierra was looking
for game designers. Corey happily applied, but Ken Williams was not interested
in hiring him until Corey showed his expertise in programming the Atari
ST. So Corey was originally hired by Sierra as a programmer, not as a designer.

I
proposed "Hero's Quest" to Sierra when Michael was two and
old enough to be able to stay in day care for a few hours while I worked
in house at Sierra. It was designed to take advantage of the in-house
tools that Sierra had. Unfortunately, I didn't really know the limitations
of the system when I started out. The original game design was different
from the game you know and love.

Choose Your Character

Instead
of Character Classes, I had the concept that you could choose the character
you wanted to play -- Elf, Gnome, Centaur, or human. The Gnome had sneaky
sort of skills, the Elf knew magic, the Centaur was an archer, and the
human could have a variety of skills. The Centaur was the first to be
cut from the game. Sierra's system wasn't designed to handle movement
from four-legged beasties. Then there was the little problem that art
resources were a limiting factor. We needed to keep the animation size
down. So rather than have several characters with very little motion
available, I opted for a single character design and a variety of movements.

I
originally conceived of Quest for Glory as a fairly serious Role-playing
Game with Adventure Game aspects. While the Gnome character would be
more humorous, the other characters would have been played straight.
However, the character designs I got from the artists were not very serious
in style. (My own original character designs were on the cartoony side,
too.) Rather than have the serious nature of the game fight with the
art style, I adapted the game play to mesh with the art. Besides, we
had two very wonderful, very funny people on the team, Jerry Moore and
Bob Fischbach.

Team Work

Bob was a programmer who understood the importance
of animation. He would take time to get the animations to look just right
because he really cared about what he doing. He was the one to start
adding the amusing comments when you typed in things that weren't originally
handled by my design. That humor added a lot to the game, and so it was
used throughout the series.

Jerry Moore cared a great deal about the game and the
characters. He designed the wacky Yorick's room at the endgame. His guards
at the endgame were made to look like the three stooges, and so that
became part of their character shtick. Many of the odds and ends in Erasmus's
house were from Jerry's imagination.

Kenn Nishiuye
was the one who suggested we change the subtitle from "How to Be
a Hero" to "So You Want to Be a Hero." He
thought the brash style fit the game better. Kenn's fine art talents
brought beauty to the limited palette of sixteen colors.

Everyone who worked on the Hero Quest game influenced
the final outcome. It really was a team project, and the synergy of the
team made the game great.